Read Monoculture: How One Story is Changing Everything for Free Online

game for hard people. Each game starts from scratch, past merits do not count, you are worth only as much as the results of your most recent duel. Each player at the moment is for herself or himself, and to progress, not to mention to reach the top, one must first cooperate in excluding the many who block the way, only to outwit in the end those with whom one cooperated.” 8
    Remember, the economic story says you live in a world of markets. As a buyer or seller in those markets, your worth among others is based on your potential or actual ability to contribute to the economy by spending or making money. For the world of markets to operate effectively, you also have to be able to make choices, process information on which to base those choices, and be able to make a new choice if you want to; those hindered by something like a learning disability are therefore “deemed to be of only marginal economic value.” 9 The more you drive the economy by making money or spending it, the more desirable you are to others. Your relational ties are primarily economic ties, and so your relationships are transactional. You learn to shun long-term commitments, no longer obligated to anyone past the transaction at hand.
    By 2000, 61 percent of married American women worked outside the home for pay, turning the breadwinner model of the family on its head and making dual-earner couples the rule, not the exception. 10 Today, whether you’re single or part of a couple, chances are there is no one at home to look after your domestic life, which means you’re almost certainly struggling to keep up with everything that’s involved in keeping a career and a home going as you work longer and longer hours.
    In the meantime, markets keep developing for what used to happen at home for free. You realize you can hire people to cook your meals, care for your children, look after your aging relatives, clean your house, do your tax return, walk the dog, mow the lawn, and prune the shrubs. Outsourcing domestic life helps you cope with the time pressures you’re under. Researcher Arlie Russell Hochschild says, “As time becomes something to ‘save’ at home as much as or even more than at work, domestic life becomes quite literally a second shift; a cult of efficiency, once centered in the workplace, is allowed to set up shop and make itself comfortable at home. Efficiency has become both a means to an end — more home time — and a way of life, an end in itself.” 11
    As work and home demand more and more of your time and energy, you may find your significant relationships becoming secondary. It’s not that you want to drift away from your spouse, family and close friends, but without spending time and energy on those relationships, they’re in danger of fading. 12 In the economic story, rewards in society are based on your performance in your paid job, after all — not on what’s going on in the rest of your life.
    Even family obligations can weigh on you. Among all of the reasons people give for having fewer children, including religion, ideology, and lifestyle preference, one of them continues to be “time famine.” 13 Many think twice about having children or having more of them. Researcher Sylvia Ann Hewlett notes that the typical childless executive woman at midlife has been subject to a “creeping nonchoice” despite the fact that almost 90 percent of high-achieving women want a family. Hewlett explains, “Think of what a 55-hour week means in terms of work-life balance. If you assume an hour lunch and a 45-minute round-trip commute (the national average), the workday stretches to almost 13 hours. Even without ‘extras’ (out of town trips, client dinners, work functions), this kind of schedule makes it extremely difficult for any professional to maintain a relationship.” 14
    In the economic story, children in particular come to represent a real economic risk and cost. Choosing to have a family begins to look like choosing